Northwest Yunnan Province: Biking with Yoav and Liron among the high mountains to traditional towns and the Tiger Leaping Gorge

Northwest Yunnan Province: Biking with Yoav and Liron among the high mountains to traditional towns and the Tiger Leaping Gorge:

After recuperating our visas, we flew back to Kunming and headed onto northwest Yunnan province. Our first stop was the town of Dali, a charming town surrounded by mountains on all sides and a lake in the east. The town has traditional houses made of stone, carved wooden doors, and curved, upward-turning roofs. Painted panels decorate the upper portion of the walls. The main Foreigner’s Street was touristy, but aside from that, most of the town seemed to have kept its old ways. Local taxis were horses and carriages. At the bottom of the hill, near the 3 Pagodas, was a preserved part of the old town that had narrow alleyways curving between the old houses, and we could sometimes catch a glimpse into the opened courtyards around which the houses were built. The town is known for marble, and one can watch artisans sculpting the stone.

The town has a very laidback atmosphere, the kind of place where “anything goes.” There is a sort of underground culture, especially among the many foreigners who live there. We met several very cool Israelis, notably Avi and Asaf, our two friendly neighbors who were so full of big smiles for everyone and so adorable with their dancing eyes and long hair. The underground culture has worked its way even into the older, local population. For instance, the drug dealers are older, Bai minority women, who sell drugs just a few feet in front of the cops! They are dressed in their traditional white and pink costumes and headdresses, and approach tourists very often, trying to sell hashish. They always respond with a sweet smile when you say, “no.” They must be the cutest drug dealers on earth – how funny!

The highlight of our stay in Dali was meeting Yoav and Liron, an Israeli couple who arrived at our guesthouse at the same moment as us. They also are cycling, and in the same direction as us for a couple of weeks, so we decided to head off together. But before continuing, I really must share their story. They had been traveling in India when they decided to start biking, after meeting a friend who had biked for two weeks. Spontaneous, sure, but so far, not too surprising. The crazy part comes when Liron explained how she had never before in her life ridden a bicycle! Their list of “Things to Do” included “buy bike,” “buy bags,” and “teach Liron how to ride a bike”! They planned to start from Thailand, and her first lesson was at 3 AM in a parking lot in Bangkok after arriving on a flight from Calcutta. The night before setting out, they stayed with a Thai family and told them how they planned to bike throughout Southeast Asia and China. As they were leaving the next morning, the family and some neighbors stood in the street to see them off, and as they tried to leave, Liron fell right over, bike and all! The neighbors watched in astonishment, jaws dropped, as it happened a second time! Apparently one practice session wasn’t enough, and they stopped at the first parking lot to practice circles. That was one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard, and I’ve laughed over it many times since. But, wow! Does it ever show you her courage and strength and determination! Way to go, Liron!

We left Dali with the two of them, and, aside from the rain and fog that obscured the mountains for a good part of the first couple of days, it was a really wonderful experience. It was the first time we had biked with other cyclists, aside from the day that we left Belgrade. We camped in the evenings or found guesthouses, and they introduced us to wonderful Israeli music and stories of Old Jerusalem.

Not far north of Dali is the town of Lijiang, which is a World Heritage site and one of the most beautiful towns I have seen. With its old wooden buildings looking into flowering courtyards, its narrow cobblestoned alleys, its artery-like canals and wooden bridges, and its local Naxi population in blue dress, Lijiang is a rare jewel. Its winding streets are a delightful maze. Small shops line the town’s streets, and there is a wide variety of handicrafts. The town is aglow at night with a soft yellow light that warms up the houses on the hillside and a red glow from the lanterns that hang from the town’s rooftops. Flower-shaped candles drift in the canals, casting mirrored reflections in the water. It is truly magical. For more on the UNESCO site, please click on “UNESCO sites” under the Chinese flag.

The view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the five-arched marble bridge in Black Dragon Pool Park are fabulous, as is the climb to the top of Elephant Hill with its commanding view over the city, which gleams in the sun’s early evening rays.

One of the most interesting experiences we have had was listening to the Naxi Orchestra in a lovely building in Old Lijiang. The Naxi music is still preserved and played as it was when it was written over 1000 years ago. It is a type of Taoist temple music that has been lost elsewhere in China, and it is played on original instruments (most of which had been destroyed in other parts of China during the Cultural Revolution). The members only have their original instruments because they buried theirs before they were confiscated. Many are made of animal skins and the stringed instruments had long necks with carved dragons at the top. Most of the 29 members are old, long-bearded men dressed in colorful and shiny costumes – just like you might see on TV!

After biking through a pretty mountain road for one day, we arrived at Qiaotou, the town at the mouth of the famed Tiger Leaping Gorge. The Gorge is an area that is part of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area – a magnificent site that is classified by the UNESCO for the following four reasons: 1) natural beauty; 2) biodiversity and threatened species; 3) an exceptional range of topographical features; 4) it displays the geological history of the last 50 million years. Its natural beauty includes high mountains, deep, parallel gorges, alpine karst, and glaciers. The area has the richest biodiversity in China, and may be the most biologically diverse temperate region on earth – the home to many rare and endangered plants and animals. For more on the UNESCO site, please click on “UNESCO sites” under the Chinese flag.

The site is well worthy of being protected. The landscape is unbelievably amazing! We hiked the 16-km. gorge in two days, and the views were fabulous from the first hour! According to Liron, who has hiked a lot in India and Nepal, it sometimes requires several days of hiking in order to have comparable views!

There is a high trail, known as the 28-bends, that winds its way up and over the mountains, and there is a new, low trail that is actually a paved road that follows the river. We hiked the high trail and biked the low trail on the way back to Qiaotou. Along the way are several guesthouses, and we stayed the first night at the quaint Naxi Family guesthouse, where we listened to music with Liron and Yoav and played “wist.”

We spent eleven hours on the trail the second day, and it was amazing. The weather cooperated beautifully. The mountains looked more like cliffs, dropping from the snow-capped peaks up to 3900 m. (12,000 ft. – over 2 1/3 miles!!!) to the Yangtze River below! The Tiger Leaping Gorge (so named because a tiger is said to have leapt across the Yangtze) is one of the deepest gorges in the world. The river, which surges between the Haba and the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, is about 1800 m. above sea level, and the glaciated peaks rise almost 6000 m. in altitude! There are spectacular waterfalls, enormous, gushing rapids, and the deep and narrow gorges around the surging river – wow!

With such a steep gradient, though, I suppose it should have hardly been surprising that gravity had its effect in occasional landslides and falling rocks. Still, I almost had a heart attack when, as we were crossing a part of the trail that passed directly next to a waterfall, a huge rock came hurtling down the side of the cliff without warning and came within about 1 1/2 ft. of smashing into Liron. She was okay, and seemed not at all shaken, as she hadn’t really seen it coming, but I took a good long while to recover. I was frightened half to death – from my viewpoint, it looked sure as anything that it was going to hit her.

Just as we were arriving in Walnut Grove at the end of the trail, we met a Chinese cyclo-tourist – a 59-year old man whose plan was to cycle around the entire perimeter of China in only ten months! It was an extraordinary physical feat, and he had already cycled 10,000 km. in just four months – much, much faster than anyone we had ever met and when you saw the gears on his bike, it was a thousand times more impressive that he had continued after facing the steep mountains! He had such a nice face and such a nice manner that we invited him to dinner and to our guesthouse that night, and then cycled back to Qiaotou with him the next morning by the road. The road was strewn with fallen rocks and awash with water from the waterfalls, and there was a sort of wind tunnel in the narrow gorges, the wind being so fierce as to make it difficult to stand up! The scenery from the route was impressive in a different way, and we were able to descend to see the ENORMOUS rapids up close. Wow – what power!